Life has too many distractions

Sometimes I wonder how I'm ever going to get everything done....maybe more than sometimes. I can feel like I'm finally making a dent, and then something happens like my dog spraining her leg. :-( Tonight she's not much better after two days on anti-inflammatories, so tomorrow we get to get X-rays and make sure that nothing worse is going on. Poor puppy.

I planned on applying for an award for students in their final year of study. My department's deadline is the day after tomorrow. I at least had most of the stuff ready to go, but I need a letter from my advisor. I emailed her about it, and her response was that the one roadblock she could see was a lack of publications (not entirely my fault, thankyouverymuch), but that I had everything else. So hopefully that means she's writing me a letter so we can get that put in as well. If by some miracle, I were to get it, that would be $5000 more in the bank, which would be awesome.


Ok. Now I'm actually starting to freak out about finding a post-doc. I need to send out letters a month ago. Oops. I realize that one is totally on me, but this is where the title of this post comes in - sooo many productive distractions in my life, or other things I have to deal with emotionally as well. Teaching, proctoring, book chapter that got "put on hold," puppy troubles, etc., etc., etc. Everyone keeps telling me it'll be fine, but it'll only be fine if I get up off my butt and do something about it. And yet, here I am, watching my dog limp around and realizing that most of tomorrow will be dealing with her. Sigh. One of these days....

Another distraction has been all these stupid vaccine things. Apparently this is one cause I am passionate about. I actually had to all but block someone on Facebook because the links she was posting made me so angry that I would waste too much time trying to argue and refute them. I need that time to do other things. Like blog instead of write my thesis, apparently.



Speaking of thesis, the other girl in my lab asked me yesterday how many pages my thesis was going to be. I told her probably close to 300 with all the tables and her jaw hit the ground. Apparently a friend of mine's was only 80 pages, who got the same degree as me. However, I have sooo much data. This is why it's taking me forever and ever...

All for naught?

My thesis is going to be Long. I just incorporated one microarray table, and doubled the size of a chapter. It will easily be 300 pages. Easily. The thing that worries me is that some of it may never see the light of day outside of my thesis. I'm not sure anyone is going to take over my project when I'm gone, so the couple of experiments that have been pains that need to be done for publication may never happen. I have watched some of my former labmates' projects plod along and go nowhere, even though at least one of them was close to ready. I even did some experiments for that one, and still not out. Maybe it's just that my advisor is really good at sitting on data. Ugh. Either way, it worries me that I have done all this work for nearly nothing. Yay....